US 2008/0033410 A1 discloses a method for automated treatment of an area of skin of a patient with laser energy. The method includes: identifying the area to be treated with the laser; modeling the identified area of the skin to be treated; and controlling the laser to direct laser energy to within the modeled area of the skin.
For many personal care products there is a wish to track the location of such personal care product, so, for example, is may be determined or detected where the related treatment has been applied. Applications range from shaving, styling, IPL epilating, skin cleansing to brushing teeth, to name only a few.
Hair cutting or trimming systems using a position of a hair cutting or trimming device in relation to the subject obtained by means of reference points attached to the head of the subject or user are discussed, for example, in WO 2013/096572 A1 and WO 2013/163999 A1. The additional and separate equipment needed in such system, however, render the process of hair cutting or trimming quite cumbersome, wherein furthermore without proper adjustment or calibration the results may be unreliable.
Other approaches on device localization are attempted by embedding accelerometer and gyro sensors in the device, while such sensors may significantly increase costs and complexity of such equipped device. In addition, even if the accelerometer and gyro information may provide for positional and movement information of the device, the relation to the subject or user is not established.
Tracking treatment (shaving, styling, epilating, cleaning, etc.) is related to tracking the relative location of the appliance to the face.
Straight forward device position tracking only provides the orientation and or position of the device itself and without knowing the users' location.
Remote tracking of the device with a camera in a consumer scenario is a very challenging task due to lighting and also due to device occlusion by the hand holding the device.
Tracking a device with a simple camera is a large challenge because of arbitrary occlusion of the device by the hand that is holding it. An attempt of limiting the movement of the user such that the device may not be occluded is quite futile.
Tracking of the applied treatment in a consumer setting is very challenging because of large variations in lighting conditions. In particular in connection with the frequent occlusions, the overall conditions (in particular the lack of control thereof) severely limit the reliability of such approach, at least for consumer settings.